Hello,

I just want to first applaud the brilliance of UDPCast and its author. This has been by far the most efficient and successful tool for cloning a large number of computers at once I have ever encountered. Thank you for making this tool freely available for the world. However, I am having a problem....The SuSe 7.3 boot disk is giving me problems on some of our computers - see http://www.udpcast.linux.lu/pipermail/udpcast/2002/000008.html for an exact reference of my problem. We are running a lab of Gateway E-4000 machines with 1.8GHz Pentium 4 processors, 60GB hard drives, and 256Mb RAM. The Ethernet cards on these machines are Intel Pro/100 VE onboard NICs.

Here's what I have discovered: If you hit control-C before Linux boots from the CD, you get a boot prompt. If you type "Linux disableapic" then the CD will bypass the error above. Everything looks okay, but when I try loading the e100 NIC driver (which I have had success with for other Pro/100 VE cards), I get an error that the module could not be loaded. I have tried all of the other Intel NIC drivers that are available, and nothing works. I have even tried having the kernel probe for the card an still nothing. Is there another way to get the NIC driver to load on these machines? By disabling APIC, am I inadvertently disabling the NIC?

I have already gotten UDPCast to work using another boot disk (found here: http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/~purschke/RescueCD/) and a statically compiled binary of UDPCast, which detects the NIC as an eepro100 (and yes, I have tried this driver using the UDPCast boot CD.) However the process is clunky and not intuitive enough for others with less Linux experience than I have, which isn't that much! Can you please, please, please guide me to a solution! I love the simplicity of the pre-built UDPCast CD, and would love to be able to use it on these problematic machines!! Thanks for your time.

Sincerely,

Mike McCall Computer Technician Rio Rancho Public Schools

Return-Path: pschmiedeskamp@fs.fed.us Received: from sv8.r1.fs.fed.us (sv8.r1.fs.fed.us [166.7.3.70]) by lll.lgl.lu (8.12.6/8.12.3/SuSE Linux 0.6) with ESMTP id h13KFC5u020249 for alain@knaff.lu; Mon, 3 Feb 2003 21:15:14 +0100 Received: from sv63.r1.fs.fed.us by sv8.r1.fs.fed.us (USDA-FS/MissoulaMT/10-10-2002) using ESMTP; id MAA27716 for alain@knaff.lu; Mon, 3 Feb 2003 12:09:30 -0700 To: udpcast@udpcast.linux.lu X-Mailer: Lotus Notes Release 5.0.7 March 21, 2001 Message-ID: OF52E35288.B33D1714-ON07256CC2.0067C4F5@r1.fs.fed.us From: "Peter W Schmiedeskamp" pschmiedeskamp@fs.fed.us Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 12:09:54 -0700 X-MIMETrack: Serialize by Router on ENTR1B/E/USDAFS(Release 5.0.11 |July 24, 2002) at 02/03/2003 12:09:58 PM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-UID: 174 Subject: [Udpcast] (no subject) Sender: udpcast-admin@udpcast.linux.lu Errors-To: udpcast-admin@udpcast.linux.lu X-BeenThere: udpcast@udpcast.linux.lu X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.13 Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: http://udpcast.linux.lu/mailman/listinfo/udpcast, mailto:udpcast-request@udpcast.linux.lu?subject=unsubscribe List-Id: Upcast Mailing List <udpcast.udpcast.linux.lu> List-Post: mailto:udpcast@udpcast.linux.lu List-Help: mailto:udpcast-request@udpcast.linux.lu?subject=help List-Subscribe: http://udpcast.linux.lu/mailman/listinfo/udpcast, mailto:udpcast-request@udpcast.linux.lu?subject=subscribe List-Archive: http://udpcast.linux.lu/pipermail/udpcast/

Hello, I'm writing because I've run into my first quandry with UDP Cast. So far I've had great luck with this software. I've successfully reimaged several labs worth of PCs.

Here's my deal now. In our network, (I'm trying to get what our network guy said right) we have a number of subnets. I.e. 192.168.0-10.X

Our router equipment allows for multicast, however the broadcast discovery packets are killed. So, it seems that I'm not able to image a machine on say 192.168.6.X subnet from 192.168.7.X subnet.

Am I just missing an option, or is it possible to specify an IP address that the clients can listen to, or possibly a way to specify a list of IPs to include in the multicast offer?

I've tried the TTL option, but it is at the router level that a broadcast offer is killed.

-Peter

and

O.K. I'm on a roll here today. One more question.

I'm looking at creating a FreeBSD utility CD that includes the udpcast program.

I try to build the software on FreeBSD, but it fails. It seems that udpcast uses getopt.h instead of unistd.h for handling the command line options.

I am not a programmer, much less a C programmer. Is this likely to be the only issue with other *nix style operating systems? Was there much magic in porting to Cygwin? Cygwin seems to try to duplicate the Linux included headers like getopt.h. I think this may be a GNU thing which would mean that support for other *nixes may be as easy as porting the getopt.h stuff to unistd.h.

The options that these two support are very very similar, however I wasn't able to get it to build. This may be a function of my programming ineptitude.

Thanks again for this really great utility. UDP Cast has saved me loads of time since I started using it only a month ago.

-Peter

Thanks a million. I've also got a tip for creating compressed system images:

Zero out the harddrive before installing the OS and other software on the machine from which the snapshot will be taken. This will make sure the disk is blank. When you are compressing the image, those zeros scrunch down pretty small! IBM has a tool for zeroing the harddisk called wipe(http://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/hddtech/wipe.exe). Otherwise, booting from a Linux / Unix floppy and doing a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX' will do it too.

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